Museums offer glimpse at local heritage

Monday

Jul 2, 2012 at 12:01 AMJul 2, 2012 at 2:04 AM

Approaching the Old North Bridge, Tuyet Nguyen stopped in the shade with a friend who pointed out a statue of a Minute Man standing beside a plow, musket in hand. “I read about it in a history book,’’ said the accountant. “They fought for freedom. My parents left Vietnam so our family could live that way.’’ As Americans get ready to celebrate the United States’ 236th anniversary on July 4, visitors to the Concord landmark as well as to other area museums and historic sites are finding themselves connected with their heritage in powerful ways.

Chris Bergeron/Daily News staff

Approaching the Old North Bridge, Tuyet Nguyen stopped in the shade with a friend who pointed out a statue of a Minute Man standing beside a plow, musket in hand.

“I read about it in a history book,’’ said the accountant. “They fought for freedom. My parents left Vietnam so our family could live that way.’’

As Americans get ready to celebrate the United States’ 236th anniversary on July 4, visitors to the Concord landmark as well as to other area museums and historic sites are finding themselves connected with their heritage in powerful ways.

Mig Gresock of Groton, who’ll turn 21 on July 4, described heritage as “your past, what a person or a country builds upon.’’

Visiting Concord recently with her husband and sons, Lisa Conquergood, of Seattle, Wash., said Daniel Chester French’s Minute Man statue kept alive the memory of ordinary citizens who risked their lives to “do a profound thing’’ that still benefits Americans.

Across MetroWest numerous museums and historic sites preserve New England’s heritage through artifacts, exhibits, activities and sometimes the site itself.

Visitors at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury can quaff the “meeting house punch’’ that might have given 18th century travelers a buzz. At the Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History in Weston, children can learn from a commemorative stamp about the four “immortal chaplains’’ who gave their life jackets to shipmates when the USS Dorchester was torpedoed in 1943. Or they can feel the brute power of a Sherman tank that battled Germans in North Africa at the Museum of World War II in Natick.

At the Wayside Inn, Museum Services Director Guy LeBlanc said visitors can relax in the garden, sample Indian rice pudding for lunch or listen to fife music at dinner. “This is the place where visitors can feel 300 years of New England’s heritage,’’ he said.

Just a short drive away in Waltham, Program Director Thom Roach described Gore Place, the grand Federal era estate of Gov. Christopher Gore, as “a vault of memories.’’

Visitors can wander around the 50-acre estate, view the wooden Grand Staircase painted to look like marble and stop by the farmer’s cottage and carriage house.

“You can imagine yourself back in 1816 and realize how much has changed and how much has remained the same,’’ said Roach.

The director of exhibitions at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, Hilary Anderson Stelling, said, “I think heritage is the objects, ideas and even events by which a person, family or community define their own identities. ... We’re trying to tell the stories of history that people can see themselves in,’’ she said.

So visitors to the museum can see ordinary objects that figured in monumental events that shaped New England’s heritage such as the musket 19-year-old Solomon Brown carried to Lexington green where Colonial militia fought British soldiers on April 19, 1775, or the plow John Curtis left in his Boxford field to join the fight.

“Visitors arrive with their own stories,’’ said Anderson Stelling. “We hope to show how those stories are part of the larger story of America’s history.’’

For Annie Murphy, executive director of the Framingham History Center, an individual’s heritage is “interwoven’’ with the strands of the nation’s past.

She believes the same can be said about the center which consists of three historic buildings “surrounded by an iconic New England commons,’’ thousands of artifacts preserved in the Edgel Library, Village Hall and the Old Academy and the shared memories of staff and volunteers.

Visitors to the Edgell Library can see the fife that teenager Thomas Nixon played to inspire Revolutionary War soldiers, a memorial to the town’s Civil War dead and the original sign for Shoppers World, the mega mall which shaped the town’s economy and growth.

The center, she said, arranges tours of historic buildings and discussions about local neighborhoods. “These are powerful ways of sharing our heritage,’’ said Murphy.

At Orchard House — the 19th century museum home of author Louisa May Alcott — Executive Director Jan Turnquist aims to share the story of life in 19th century Concord and New England through the “spirit’’ of its occupants, the remarkable Alcott family.

Little changed since writer Bronson Alcott and his wife lived there with their three daughters from 1858 to 1877, the household journals, furniture and artifacts of the family that was the model for Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, “Little Women.’’

“We try to keep it pretty much as the Alcotts left it,’’ said Turnquist. “Visitors tell us they feel as if they just stepped back in time.’’

At Old Sturbridge Village, Chief Historian Tom Kelleher recalled that the son of founder A.B. Wells told his father in the 1930s to “take this collection of dead antiques and make them into a living village.’’

Embracing the vision of George Wells who became the site’s second president, Kelleher said visitors today are encouraged to weed a garden, cut ice or even help guide an ox pulling a plow.

“Audiences today don’t just want to see something or hear about life in the 1830s. They want to participate in everyday life,’’ said Kelleher. “So much of our modern world is artificial. But here, the fire is real. The food is real. The animals are real. Experiencing the past helps you understand the present.’’

The heritage Kenneth Rendell is keeping alive is the horror and heroism of the world’s greatest cataclysm in his private Museum of World War II in Natick, which features 6,000 weapons, uniforms, equipment, and pieces of art.

Rendell said “the unique thing about his museum is how it encourages visitors to relate to the everyday people caught up in World War II.’’

“The museum presents (artifacts) on a human level to put visitors into the context of the World War II generation of their own parents and grandparents,’’ he said.

Since the museum is designed for small groups, Rendell said visitors get the “touch, feel and smell’’ of M-1 rifles, the uniforms of a Nazi officer and a Jewish concentration camp prisoner and a landing craft.

At Fruitlands Museum in Harvard Chief Curator Michael Volmar said visitors can explore separate museums devoted to Native American history, the Shaker movement, Bronson Alcott’s Utopian community or the Hudson River artists.

“Our collection is geared around a time in the 19th century that saw seminal changes to the American identity, he said. “Visitors can get real insights into a period of industrial and technological change that unleashed forces that America the flavor it still has today.’’

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